6 Feb 2016

About this Tea and Me and this Blog // part II

Part I: http://chazichaxi.blogspot.de/2016/01/about-this-tea-and-me-and-this-blog.html

Hello, my name is Christian, and I am infatuated with tea. Logically, that hasn't always been the case.

While planning to move into my first flat, I once ran into my parents' neighbours who were just sorting out some stuff from their house, and they happened to have an old teapot with matching tea warmer and cups to give away.

It felt somehow Asiatic with its whole flowery design, cups without handles and the overhead bamboo holder. The pot even came with incorporated strainer holes at the spout's base. Owning a teapot of course moved me to stock up on (bag) tea which I soon accustomed myself to drinking nearly every day, by the litre. Besides the standard "real tea" lone warriors, namely random green tea and Darjeeling, it was really a selection of tisanes, herbals & co that I picked from.

One day, my sister and I spotted a cute manatee shaped sorta-tea-egg, which she subsequently gave me for my next birthday. Reasonably, she got me a loose tea to it, an organic gunpowder. The manatee unfortunately turned out to be very suitable neither for expanding tea leaves nor water amounts over one cup. Well. Back to drinking mostly the bags then. It wasn't meant to be yet.

Until I ordered a Sencha in an alternative café and got it served as a nice mini Gongfu Cha setup. Two glass pots and a small cup on a bamboo tray, with the right-tempered water in a Tetsubin aside. I found it too uncomfortable to ask how it worked, but was luckily able to figure it out myself. It carried me away!

Soon I bought me a second teapot (a one-litre glass one) to recreate the method at home, putting my gunpowder tea right into the porcelain pot. I experimented with shorter steeping time and a second or sometimes third infusion, with less water for each.